Two in One

In Progress:

I decided to mix the face of a girl and a traditional  Day of the Dead sugar skull. I chose to do this because one of my favorite things to draw is a persons face. This is because i like that every face is different. You can make the nose, eyes, lips, eyebrows, basically everything different. I can create a whole new person just with a pencil and paper. The reason why i chose the sugar skull is because i have always been intrigued  by them. There's something interesting to me how you can take something typically gruesome and creepy and make it beautiful, yet still unnerving, by painting intricate details and adding other gentle features, such as flowers. By mixing the delicate and innocent girls face with the almost overcrowded and creepy skull i can play with the idea of juxtaposition, which is something i often enjoy doing. The simple and delicate features of the girl clashes with the chaos of the skulls face.

 The medium i chose to work with was charcoal. I plan on drawing the basic outline with pencil and going back with charcoal to add depth to the girls/skulls features.Charcoal was the medium i chose because its my favorite medium to work with. Its easy to shade with and i tend to make most of my pieces very dark, and the charcoal allows me to get a rich black color.

So far the part that i am struggling the most with is the girls nose. I want her nose to be delicate, almost like a china dolls, to really extenuate the idea of juxtaposition that i am playing with, but every time i either make it too big or way too small, i mean it either looks like she has a  nose the size of a five pound rock or a pebble.

Finished:

I absolutely love the skull/skeleton side of my piece. The detail and shading turned out just the way i wanted it. Drawing a skeleton was something i had never done before, but it completely fits my personal style and i LOVE the way it turned out.

Although I am fairly proud of my drawing, i think there are definitely places for improvement. The plan for the girls face was to make her look almost like a china doll, therefore i wish i had made her lips smaller. Among other things, i feel that the placement of the nose is a bit too high and still too big.